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Willoughby Hires New Assistant Principals

August 16, 2011

by:

Dwayne Page

Director of Schools Mark Willoughby has hired the new assistant principals.

Willoughby, who made the announcement Tuesday morning on WJLE, said that Julie Vincent has been hired as assistant principal at Northside Elementary School and Karen Knowles at Smithville Elementary School. Sabrina Farler, who has been at DeKalb Middle School asked for a transfer to become the assistant principal at DeKalb West School. Kathy Bryant will be moving from Northside Elementary to take Farler's place as assistant principal at DeKalb Middle School.

These assistant principals are needed, according to Willoughby, and they will help to ease the burden of increased teacher evaluations mandated by the state. "This is being done primarily due to the new evaluation system but really this is something that should have been done years ago. These are great people going into some needed positions and this will enhance the education of students in DeKalb county," said Willoughby.

Although a total of $225,000 was budgeted to fund those positions from the school system's BEP reserves, Willoughby said their salaries are not in the $70 thousand dollar range as some have speculated. The salaries actually range from $44,623 to $54,466. Contracts for the new assistant principals are for 10 months and two weeks.

Chuck Cagle of the Tennessee School Boards Association, who represents the DeKalb County Board of Education as legal counsel, talked about the new teacher evaluation requirements last week during a special county commission meeting. "We are now facing in education things that we've never had to face before and things about which we have very little control. Every school principal in your district has just watched the evaluations that he or she must perform increase by ten times. Prior to this evaluation system we evaluated tenured teachers twice in ten years and we evaluated probationary teachers for the first three years until they were eligible for tenure. Now, every teacher in DeKalb County schools will be evaluated annually, tenured teachers four times a year and probationary teachers six times a year," said Cagle